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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

TopRankBlog.com & Mr. Lee Odden

If you are looking for information on how to utilize blogs for marketing your site, you need to check out TopRankBlog.com.

Mr. Lee Odden spoke about many great ideas, but one that was most interesting and easy to implement was how bloggers need to interlinking blog postings is one of the best ideas that you can do simply by creating hyperlinks within your blog passes both PageRank and trust credibility in the blog. Mr. Odden says to crosslink the postings with anchor text for more exposure to other pages within your blog which will potentially boost your blog traffic as well.

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Anonymous
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Here is another great article by Lee Odden:

Scott Monty Interview - Tips on Social Media for Large CompaniesPosted by Lee Odden on Sep 22nd, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Other Events, Social Media | Blogs are undoubtedly a big part of the social media world and that’s why the topic of social media was approached at Blog World Expo from many different angles from monetization and marketing to social media and blogs in corporate public relations.

This interview with Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty touches on a few things large companies (or any size company for that matter) should be thinking about when evaluating social media as a communications, marketing and community building channel.

Social media and search marketing: Are they two peas in a pod, complimentary or two very distinct channels?

I think the answer is all of the above, depending on the situation. The growth in attention to social media as a marketing, communication and community building opportunity deserves attention by all sorts of online marketers, especially those in search marketing.

How does social media affect search marketing?

Searcher expectations have changed. - Searchers no longer have the sole expectation of searching to find information for a specific outcome. As people spend more and more time connecting, sharing and interacting with the social web, they now often expect to interact with what they find in the search results.

Searchers have always been able to save the useful things they find in search results by bookmarking or saving to the favorites in the browser. Bookmarks are now social, to be shared and leveraged via the collective wisdom of preferences from other likeminded searchers. The growth and popularity of socially enabling web applications (social bookmarks, news, networking, messaging, publishing & media sharing) drive consumer expectations for social interaction with search even more.

Another aspect to searcher expectations is that consumers search social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, MySpace) to a small degree, as an alternatives to standard search for information, references and recommendations. People don’t trust formal marketing messages and there is something inherently more trustworthy about recommendations made by others willing to take the time to review products/services and share their opinions. Marketers realize this of course and as a result, there has been an increase in the number of “fake” reviews on ecommerce sites.

Read more about social media and how it affects search by visiting http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/09/how-does-social-media-affect-search/

- The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to

- Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

What it boils down to is marketing. The SEO most consultants practice today isn’t really search engine optimization, it’s marketing web sites online. SEO marketing efforts that focus solely on keyword lists, meta tags and directory submissions are just one small slice of web site marketing.

RSS makes your news subscribable - Make it easy for media, clients, staff and your target market to stay up to date with your company’s news and reinforce your brand.

Journalists look for company blogs - Give them what they’re looking for.

Bloggers trust other bloggers more than the media - Blogger relations is a slippery slope, but can be a very fruitful one. Relating to bloggers in your industry as more of a blogger rather than a media relations person or marketer is more of a legitimate effort and will get you further.

Blogging results are a measurable PR activity - A longstanding issue with PR is a lack of good success metrics.

Here is another article that talks about blogging from Ion Interactive, a company that was also at SES San Jose 2008: http://www.ioninteractive.com/press-coverage/2008/8/20/top-rank-blog-recaps-ses-san-jose-landing-page-utopia.html.

And another article from Top Rank Blog:http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/08/landing-page-utopia/

Here is an article that says you should skip Digg...http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/11/10/skip-digg-not-all-traffic-is-created-equal/

But how many of those people have turned it into a sustainable strategy for making money? Did they do it after reading the same “Top 10 Ways to Win on Digg” guide as 100,000 other traffic-hungry bloggers?

I’m here to tell you the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

For those who aren’t familiar with Digg (yeah right), here’s a snippet from the about page:

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg.”

That requires some translation. Here’s what it really means (with tongue planted firmly in cheek):

“Digg is a place for 18-24 year old males to read about Internet gossip. From the smallest local news rags to the wittiest satire websites, Digg surfaces the stuff most entertaining to our users as determined by our large staff of editors.”